Chapter 2

The Formal Introduction

The drawing room of the Crowell manor had a high ceiling and long windows, as though bent on proving the might of a great northern house, and from every wall the portraits of ancestors looked down on visitors out of gilded frames. It was the afternoon after three straight days of rain had finally let up, and the sunlight coming through the windows was clear, yet even that light seemed to cool once on entering this room, before it ever touched the marble floor.

Sion Arden stood in the middle of that room and looked down at the cuffs of the dress uniform he wore. The formal uniform of the royal knights was the most expensive garment he owned, and yet beneath curtains woven with gold thread it somehow looked borrowed. It always did, when a man of common birth stood in a noble drawing room. It was a kind of discomfort he had never once felt with a sword in his hand.

"Sit."

Duke Gerald Crowell's voice was brief. Seated in a high-backed chair beside the fireplace, the duke held his back straight despite being past fifty, and his grey eyes weighed every person they rested on, as if setting them on a scale. On the sofa beside him sat Duchess Isolde with her fan half open, and next to her a fair-haired young lady of perhaps nineteen was examining her fingernails with a look of profound boredom.

Sion took the chair the duke indicated; the matching chair set opposite it was still empty.

"Adelaide will be down shortly. That child is always..."

"Late."

Duchess Isolde took up the sentence from behind her fan. Her voice was soft as honey, but there was a needle in the honey.

"Sir Arden, allow me to apologize in advance. The girl finds it terribly difficult to show herself before people. All the more so since those unfortunate events. How brave of you, Sir. The seventh."

"It was His Majesty's command, Your Grace."

"I'm sure it was. His Majesty, really."

As the duchess let her words trail off with a laugh, the fair-haired young lady added, without lifting her eyes from her nails, "If you get engaged to my sister, you really will die. I've warned you."

"Céline."

The duke's voice sank low, and Céline pouted and returned to her nails. Without changing his expression, Sion wrote line after line in the notebook in his head. The stepmother is hostile to her stepdaughter; the half-sister does not welcome her elder sister's match; the duke cuts off his wife and daughter but does not contradict them.

It was not a place where he could take out his notebook, so he counted the lines off instead by folding his gloved fingers one by one against his knee.

It was then that the drawing room door opened.

As she came down the stairs, Adel smoothed the pleats at the waist of her gown three times with her fingertips. The deep navy gown was neither too dark for a time of mourning nor too bright for receiving a fiancé. Six rehearsals had taught her exactly what to wear on a day like this.

She drew one breath before the drawing room door, then pushed it open. Four pairs of eyes turned toward her at once. Adel singled out the one pair she had never seen before and, in the half beat before her gaze dropped to the floor, swept over it quickly.

Twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven. Height, seven-tenths of the doorframe. The uniform is tailored but old; the shoulder seams are worn, and the boots have been resoled twice.

Calluses between the right forefinger and thumb. But there's a callus in the same spot on the left hand, too. Someone trained to use both hands.

And when he sat, he turned himself so he could see both the door and the window. That isn't how a fiancé sits.

"I-I'm Adelaide Crowell. I'm sorry... for being late."

Voice small, the ends of the words trembling. Adel bent her knees in a curtsy and sat in the empty chair opposite. Hands folded in her lap, eyes at about his third button.

"Sion Arden, my lady."

The man's voice was lower than she had expected, more courteous than she had expected, and, as expected, stiff.

The duke added a few formal remarks. The wedding would be set for half a year hence, and in the meantime Sir Arden was permitted to come and go from the manor as her fiancé; he was asked to accompany Adel to her social engagements insofar as it did not interfere with his duties as a royal knight. Duchess Isolde folded and unfolded her fan and laughed that she did hope Sir would last the half year, and Céline never once took her eyes off her nails.

Father hasn't looked at me even once.

Instead of following that thought any further, Adel shifted the grip of the fingers folded in her lap.

"It would be well to show the two of them the garden."

The duke rose from his seat, and with that the introduction was over. As she rose from her chair, Adel looked once more at the knight across from her.

If the investigator His Majesty sent sees me as the killer, that's dangerous.

And useful, too. Guard records, the coroner's reports, the Academy archives. He's someone who can go where I can't.

The gardens of the Crowell manor were, as befitted the north, not showy. Low boxwood divided the paths into geometric patterns, and here and there between them late-blooming frost roses let their rain-soaked petals hang heavy. The wet gravel crunched with every step.

Sion walked half a step behind the lady, which was the distance a knight kept when escorting a lady, and also the distance an investigator kept when observing a suspect. From behind, the lady looked considerably smaller than she had in the drawing room. Each time the hem of her navy gown brushed the gravel it picked up a little wet earth, but she did not seem to mind.

"May I ask you a few things, my lady?"

"Y-yes. Of course."

"How long had you known Sir Noah Bertel?"

As he put the question, Sion watched her shoulders. When people lie, their shoulders stiffen before their faces do. The lady's shoulders did not stiffen; instead, her steps on the gravel slowed, ever so slightly.

"Three months. At the Academy library... that's where I first met him."

"Did you visit Sir Bertel after he fell ill?"

"...Twice. In the last week, they let no one in but family."

"Did you hear anything about Sir Bertel's condition? The physician's opinion, perhaps."

The lady stopped walking and stood before a single frost rose. Her gloved fingertips touched a wet petal lightly. A drop of water ran down the petal and soaked into her glove.

"I only heard it was consumption. They say he wouldn't put down his books, even while he coughed."

Her voice trembled thinly, and Sion did not simply let that tremor pass. It might be real, or it might not. The nobleman he had let slip some years ago had trembled in exactly that way in the courtroom.

"Sir Arden."

The lady took her hand from the petal and turned. Her gaze still rested somewhere about his buttons.

"For someone who came to be my fiancé... you ask a great many questions."

Sion did not answer at once. He wanted to know first whether she had been counting those questions one by one.

"My apologies. An occupational habit."

"It's all right. There's something I'm curious about, too."

For the first time, the lady raised her head and looked straight at him. Her eyes were grey, like her father's, yet instead of weighing him they showed, like a clear pool of water, the face of whoever looked into them first.

"Aren't you afraid, Sir? There were six of them."

Sion considered for a moment, then decided to answer honestly. It was one of the few virtues he had.

"I'm not afraid of curses, my lady. People are what frighten me."

The lady's eyes widened for the briefest moment, the space of a blink, then dropped to the ground again.

"...I see."

After that the two of them walked one more circuit of the boxwood maze and exchanged a few words about the weather and about the ball at House Lambert, the Marquess's house, next week. The lady said she did not wish to go to the ball, Sion said he would accompany her as her fiancé, and the lady gave a small nod at that. Until they left the garden and took their leave before the front entrance, the lady never once looked him squarely in the face.

As the carriage passed out through the iron gates of the Crowell manor, Fen Howard, seated opposite, crossed his legs as though he had been waiting for this. He was Sion's partner knight, and today he had sat beside the coachman's box the entire time, counting the movements of the household servants.

"So, how's the Lady Reaper? Is she the killer?"

Instead of answering, Sion took a small notebook from inside his coat and looked over what he had written today. The stepmother and the half-sister and the duke, two visits to the sickbed, and consumption.

"...I don't know."

"You don't know? You?"

"I asked her four questions in the garden."

"And?"

"She stopped walking precisely after the fourth. When I asked about Bertel's illness."

Fen whistled. Bracing the notebook on his knee in the swaying carriage, Sion drew a small question mark beside the word consumption.

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